Musings from a Fellow Struggler

Archive for the tag “reincarnation”

According to many of the world’s religions a human being will endure any number of births, deaths, and re-births on a journey towards enlightenment and a final release from the samsaric cycle. The ‘re-birth’ part is called reincarnation or being ‘rebodied’.

There is a Christian version of this called being ‘born-again’ which includes an eternal re-embodiment called ‘resurrection’ both given final definition by the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Thus, the Christian who dies in Christ and whose body perishes, as do all natural things, will once again be re-bodied, only now with an eternally incorruptible body fit for the new environment it finds itself in, namely heaven and the presence of God. This will only happen once, no nearly endless reincarnations in hope of finally being released from samsara, because “it is appointed to man once to die and then the judgment.” Therefore, the Christian version of being ‘re-bodied’ is not an escape from, but a fulfillment of a grand design formed from eternity in the mind of God and executed in time, space and a material world.

Furthermore, Christianity rejects the idea that the true, ideal or ultimate existence is an amorphous one wherein all sense of self-consciousness is gone and the body is merely a vessel to be discarded when the samsaric reoccurrence is broken. Rather, being re-bodied is part of a perfection wherein the self becomes its true self, what it was meant to be from the beginning, fully conscious of its embodiment and of the God who created it in the first place.

It shouldn’t really be that surprising that similarities exist between the major world’s religions and Christianity. After all, Romans 1 makes it clear that the world stands guilty before God because it knows that He exists and what He is like by His creation. We must be careful, however, not to confuse similarity with sameness, as if they are both saying the same thing, only differently. Christianity brings together through two magnificent events, the Incarnation of Logos and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the final truth of what it means to be really, finally and ultimately alive that other religions can only hint at.

And this is one major theme of Easter: the triumph of life over death. Because He lives, we now live and shall continue so for eternity. We share in the life of God, the Source of all Life, Life itself, in fact for He is the God of the living and not of the dead.